THE FATE OF WOMEN OF GENIUS

Date:
September 13, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
Section 7; Page 7, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline:
By MARY GORDON;
Mary Gordon's most recent novel is ''The Company of Women.''
Lead:

This introduction to ''A Room of One's Own'' will appear in the new edition of the book to be published in November by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in honor of the centennial of Virg inia Woolf's birth.
By MARYGORDON

Virginia Woolf foresaw with clarity the responses to ''A Room of One's Own.'' She wrote in her diary in 1929: ''I forecast, then, that I shall get no criticism, except of the evasive jocular kind ... that the press will be kind & talk of its charm, & sprightliness; also I shall be attacked for a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist ... I shall get a good many letters from young women. I am afraid it will not be taken seriously. ... It is a trifle, I shall say; so it is, but I wrote it with ardour and conviction. ... You feel the creature arching its back & galloping on, though as usual much is watery & flimsy & pitched in too high a voice.''

Text:

As usual, Woolf's standards for herself were mercilessly high. A trifle? Hardly. Yet it is easy to see why it was, by some critics, so perceived. Originally given as lectures at Newnham and Girton colleges, ''A Room of One's Own'' was published in October 1929 at a time when feminist writing was so little in vogue as to be effectively moribund, when the Feminist Movement, connected as it had come to be almost exclusively with female suffrage, considered its work finished. October 1929. It is astonishing to contemplate that ''A Room of One's Own'' fell into the hands of the London literary public at the same time that Wall Street investors were leaping from their windows in despair. Understandably, the political attentions of intellectuals were turned not to the problems of women but to economic and world crisis. The name of Mussolini is spoken by Woolf in this essay, but his presence is peripheral; it is eclipsed by his spiritual brother the college beadle, chasing women from lawns, forbidding them the library.

''A Room of One's Own'' opened Woolf up to the charges - snobbery, estheticism - by that time habitually laid at the Bloomsbury gate by the generation that came of age in the late Twenties. To an extent, the accusations are just: Woolf is concerned with the fate of women of genius, not with that of ordinary women; her plea is that we create a world in which Shakespeare's sister might survive her gift, not one in which a miner's wife can have her rights to property; Woolf's passion is for literature, not for universal justice. The thesis of ''A Room of One's Own '' -women must have money and privacy in order to write - is inevitably connected to questions of class: ''Genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people.'' The words are hard; how infuriating they must have been to, say, a D.H. Lawrence. But Woolf is firm. Genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible. And the money cannot be earned; it must come to the writer in the form of a windfall or a legacy, or it will bring with it attachments, obligations.
Woolf's sen se of the writer's vocation is religious in its intensity. Th e clarity of heart and spirit that she attributes to writers like Shakespeare and Jane Austen, who have expressed their genius ''whol e and entire,'' demands a radical lack of self and ego that might be required of a saint. Yet the writer cannot, for Woolf, work to be ri d of the self; the writer must be born into a world which never a llows grievances to appear, or must be born of a soul made of stuff that will not bear the impress of resentment.

When the writer's personal grievances intrude, the art is muddied, cracked. It is the fault Woolf finds with Charlotte Bronte: ''The woman who wrote those pages (of ''Jane Eyre'') had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. ... She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.''

Serenity, selflessness, freedom from rage: the words recall the mystics' counsels. Yet, unlike the mystics, with their dualistic bias. Woolf finds the body good, the senses delightful: they feed, they do not distract, the spirit. ''One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,'' she insists. Her joy in sensual satisfaction is magnificently expressed in her description of lunch at an Oxbridge men's college; it is one of the immortal meals in literature. Of its aftermath, she writes: ''No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company ... how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one's kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sank among the cushions in the window seat.''

Woolf says that we who live after the First World War have lost something beautiful, some necessary grace. We do not hum under our breaths; we are cats without tails; we are encumbered by our anger, our sense of doom, more important, perhaps, by our sexual selfconsciousness. The war destroyed illusions, particularly for men. Women have, for Woolf (how unrealistically hopeful her illusion), given up their roles as ''looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of m an at twice its natural size.'' Therefore men are angry; Woolf sees t his anger in everything she reads about women when she begins her que st to discover why womenare so poor (their college serves stringy bee f, custard and prunes), why so few women have written.

The first question has an easy answer: women are poor because, instead of making money, they have had children. The second question is far more complex, and Woolf's attempt to answer it leads her to history. She reads the lives of women and concludes that if a woman were to have written, she would have had to overcome an enormous array of circumstances. Women were betrothed in their cradles; they were married at 15; they bore a dozen children, many ofthose children died, and they went on bearing children. Moreover, they were uneducated; they had no privacy; even Jane Austen had to write in the common sitting room and hide her work under blotting paper so as not to be discovered. Yet even when they were freed from the practical impediments imposed upon their sex, they could not write because they had no tradition to follow. No sentence had been shaped, by long labor, to express the experience of women. ''It is useless to go to the great men writers for help,'' Woolf writes, ''however much one may go to them for pleasure. ... (They) never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use.'' Of all women writers, only Jane Austen found a sentence to fit her.

The shapely sentence; it is another necessary legacy, the lack of which makes every woman writer parvenue. For Woolf is certain that the experience of men and the experience of women are extremely different, and they need different sentences to contain the shapes of their experience. Women's writing has, in addition, been impoverished by the limited access women have had to life; what could the writing of George Eliot have been like, Woolf wonders, had Miss Evans fought in the Crimea; what would the work of Tolstoy have been had he lived in seclusion in a suburb with a woman not his wife? Yet the hiddenness, the anonymity of women's lives has endowed them with a great beauty, and the challenge Woolf gives to women writers is to capture these lives in all their variety: ''All these minutely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said ... and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo ... or from the violet-sellers and the match-sellers and the old crones stationed under doorways: or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women. ... Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the everchanging and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and d own among the faint scents that come through chemists' bot of dress material over a floor of pseudo-marble .''

This is, indeed, a challenge whose proportions are heroic. The novelist imagined by Woolf, a young woman named Mary Carmichael who has money and privacy, has not met it in her first book, ''Life's Adventure,'' despite the heartening sentences ''Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together.'' Miss Carmichael is a good novelist: she writes with spirit; she has many new and interesting things to say. But she is not a genius. Given her tradition, how can she be but ''awkward ... and without the unconscious bearing of long descent which makes the least turn of the pen of a Thackeray or a Lamb delightful to the ear.''

Woolf lays down ''Life's Adventure'' with disappointment, saying ''she will be a poet ... in another hundred years' time.'' She turns to the window and sees a man and a woman getting into a taxi. This sight she finds so immensely attractive, so profoundly soothing, that it reminds her how unnatural it is to think of the sexes as separate, how natural to think of them as cooperating with one another. And it leads her to speculate that, just as there are two sexes in the natural world, there must be two sexes in the mind, and that it is their union that is responsible for creation. She recalls Coleridge's idea that a great mind is androgynous: ''Coleridge certainly did not mean ... that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.''

The androgynous mind must be a pure vessel - we are back, once more, to the important idea of purity - for the transmission of reality, ''what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge ... what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.'' But it is particularly difficult for a modern to transmit reality. Modern women are frustrated and angry, their experience is limited; modern men are obsessed with the letter ''I''; their writing is full of self-conscious indecency, self-conscious virility. It is essentially sterile.

Thus, unless men and women can be androgynous in mind, lite rature itself will be permanently flawed. And this i s the reason for Woolf'sown for women. It is notthat she wants women to write better than men : ''All this pitting of sex against sex ... all this claiming of supe riority and imparting ofinferiority, belong to the private-school sta ge of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is ... of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the ha nds of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.''

It is to encourage writing of genius, to discourage flawed work that Woolf is so insistent upon money and privacy for women. And by whom are these works to be created? By Shakespeare's sister, the imaginary woman invented by Woolf, who killed herself because of the frustration of unexpressed genius. ''If we face the fact .. that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the ... dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down,'' Woolf says.

Was it the body of Shakespeare's sister that Virginia Woolf laid down when she walked into the river? The tone of ''A Room of One's Own'' discourages the speculation. It is an exalted tone, an inspired tone; there is nothing petty in it, and nothing of the merely personal. Human happiness, the happiness of writers - questions by which we, in our age, seem enthralled - do not enter these pages. What is important, what is essential, is that works of genius be created. In that writers' unhappiness interferes with their creation, one should be concerned with the happiness of writers. The important thing is that they must express reality; they must express their genius, not themselves. They must illuminate their own souls, but they must not allow the souls to get in the way of reality. For pitted against reality, against the great tradition of immortal literature, the self is puny; it is of no interest.

The tone of ''A Room of One's Own'' is exalted, but it is also conversational. A human voice provides its music, a voice of great charm. It came to be written because Virginia Woolf was asked to lecture at women's colleges on the subject of Women and Fiction. Her interest in the subject was vital. She had felt cheated in her education, and felt the cheat for all those who had gone before her - she was as angry, in some ways, as Charlotte Bronte. But there was another reason for the writing of this book. When one thinks of that reason, one sees Virginia Woolf not for the moment the Olympian virgin of the early portrait, or the august woman of letters of the late ones, but the woman in one of the snapshots. Her legs are crossed; there is a dog at her feet. She looks friendly; she may be approachable. It is November 6, 1929. She is writing to her friend G. Lowes Dickinson, explaining the reasons for ''A Room of One's Own' ': ''I wa nted to encourage the young women - they seem to get fearfully dep ressed.''